Media

How to Read the News Without Losing Your Mind: Emma Varvaloucas

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Photo by Nijwam Swargiary | Unsplash

We’ll go back to more on the Squillace paper next week, but based on comments, it appears that not many people (this week, at least) are interested in BLM and Forest planning.

I’ve been spending time during this season of Lent online with a group of spiritually-oriented folks. In our online discussions, it was common to say things like “we have destroyed the planet” and one spiritual leader whom I respect greatly said “we are like a metastatic cancer.” There wasn’t really an opportunity for me to say “that’s Malthus!” or “that’s Edward Abbey!”. People just tossed that off as if it were a fact, that everyone must know, and agrees with. I attribute this, and especially the certainty around it, as being influenced by news sources. It’s particularly prominent in the environmental/forest world, but occurs everywhere. I recommend reading this entire piece, by Emma Varvaloucas, and here are some excerpts.

Is it possible to stay informed and engaged without destroying our faith in humanity every morning?

Yes. The key is learning how to read the news with an understanding of both its structure and your own brain’s, a critical (but not distrustful) eye, and an equanimous, long-term perspective. We’ve gathered these ideas into a five-step approach for how to keep reading the news—without losing your mind.

Remember the Long Game: In Case of a Crisis, Zoom Out
The word crisis gets a lot of exercise in the news. During one week in June 2019, news outlets reported on the following crises: child-care, college dropouts, immigration, the climate, opioids, Sudan, homelessness, cops’ mental health, rural healthcare, retail landlords in the UK, lead, farming, money laundering, guacamole, sex abuse, the automotive industry, Iran, Moldova, India’s GDP, Pakistan, Venezuela, Israeli bacon, Trump’s reelection prospects, Boeing’s 737 MAX, the world economy, pastoral courage, and Canadian national unity.

That is a lot of crises to keep track of. And, with no disrespect to the importance of Canadian patriotism or avocados, they cannot all possibly be a crisis.

In 2018 the Los Angeles Times and others reported on “an epidemic of nicotine addiction among kids” because of the rising numbers of teens who had tried vaping, or electronic cigarettes. CDC figures attest that between 2011 and 2018, there was a 1.5% increase in high schoolers who reported that they used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days and a .6% increase in middle schoolers.
Meanwhile, during this nicotine “epidemic,” cigarette, cigar, and smokeless tobacco use all went down during the same period for high schoolers, with a 7.7%, 4%, and 2% drop, respectively. (Hookah use stayed the same.) And lest you still think that today’s kids have just switched from Marlboro to Juul, take a look at these long-term numbers from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. This is the percent of students by grade who smoke cigarettes, including traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and hookah, daily from 1976 to 2018. Since the seventies, and consistently from the late nineties on, youth tobacco use has been plunging:

So are we in the midst of a nicotine epidemic, or simply a changing landscape in the midst of a long-term success story? The point is not that we shouldn’t be concerned by teenagers vaping—we should, especially if new companies are specifically targeting young people and nonsmokers. There is a reason why this story appeared in the news, and tobacco use hasn’t dropped so dramatically because action wasn’t taken.

But as always in the case of a crisis, take a moment before you panic, and try zooming out. No one has the time to research the wider long-term narrative of every news story they read. You can, though, keep in mind that there often is one.

Hopefully we can contribute to the “wider long-term narrative” of some forest-related news stories.

Media, Divides and Talking Across Them: Some Polling and Some History

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Both of these sources (Limerick’s history post and the webinar) talk about people in the middle.

The Colorado Media Project had an interesting webinar on “Reclaiming the Public Square: Trust, Media and Democracy in Post-Election Colorado.” I think it’s worth watching to get the views of (some) media folks on problems and solutions. The presentation by Stephen Hawkins runs from 5:06 to 18:00 and was my first introduction to More in Common

More in Common works on both short and longer term initiatives to address the underlying drivers of fracturing and polarization, and build more united, resilient and inclusive societies.

More in Common divides Americans politically into eight “Tribes” (see the chart above). Following that is a presentation about some Gallup polling that put people into three political categories (Ds, Is and R’s)(see chart above). It would be interesting to take some forest-related questions and see what different narratives might result from dividing folks who answer into three or eight categories. My guess is that eight would yield more understanding of peoples’ points of view. You don’t have to be a sociologist of science to think that how you structure the study (what groups you choose, exactly what questions you ask) can affect the answers you obtain.

Patty Limerick had an interesting idea in her “Not My First Rodeo” post History’s Essential Workers about the role of interpreters in Western history.

A Familiar Story from the Past, A Fresh Approach for the Present
As Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traveled from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean, the terrain they crossed presented an almost unfathomable variety of landforms. And yet the diversity of the languages they encountered proved far more difficult to comprehend.

At every stage of the trip, the expedition encountered a group that spoke a different language. On a few occasions, this required Clark and Lewis to engage in an early nineteenth century experimentation with what would later be called “the telephone game,” a chain of interpreters lined up to pass on a single message. In one episode when clear communication was of great importance, Lewis spoke in English to a French soldier from the expedition. The soldier then spoke in French to the expedition’s official interpreter, Toussaint Charbonneau. Charbonneau then spoke in Hidatsa to Sacagawea, who spoke in Shoshone to a leader of that tribe. And then the process reversed: Shoshone to Hidatsa to French to English.

Here’s an idea that we suspect no one else has proposed: this would be a good time to adopt his chain of translation and put it to use to our world today.

There is no mistaking our national dilemma: people who are firmly committed to one political position are unable to communicate with people who are firmly committed to an opposite political position.

Lewis and Clark offer us a promising technique.

A far-left progressive Democrat would speak to a centrist Democrat. The moderate Democrat would speak to a centrist Republican. The centrist Republican would speak to a far-right Republican, who could then offer his response to the centrist Republican, and that response would then move back along the chain.

After a few messages have traveled back and forth through the chain, the time would be right for a designated interpreter to step in. Asking everyone to pause, the interpreter could ask everyone a few debriefing questions: “What did you just hear? Was it what you expected to hear? Where do you agree and disagree? Were there parts that you simply did not understand and that need more explanation? Do you need to keep using this chain of indirection, or are you ready now to talk with each other?”

Limerick has an interesting idea but in our forest world, I’m not sure our views fall into neat political categories whether three, four as in Limerick, or eight. Thoughts?

How Which Media Outlets We Read Can Affect Our Views: Another Shout-Out to Local News

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Vince Bzdek of the Colorado Springs Gazette wrote a piece on Sunday that described a Knight poll:

I’ve observed this myself:

“Recent studies have suggested the loss of local news coverage in many areas may be a factor in Americans’ current level of political polarization,” the Knight study concludes, “as national news outlets tend to focus more on issues that have a partisan angle or include partisan conflict.”

Bzdek goes on:

But this one surprised me. More than eight in 10 Americans also believe the news media has the ability to heal such divisions.

What? you say. How? you ask.

A separate Gallup/Knight Foundation web survey conducted in December 2019 asked Americans that very question.

The No. 1 answer was ensuring reporters cover people who have views different from their own with respect and understanding (89%). That was followed closely by hiring reporters who come from a variety of different backgrounds, both ethnic and ideological (80%).

About three-quarters of Americans (74%) think hosting forums that bring people from different backgrounds together to discuss their experiences (like the Gazette’s Community Conversations) are healing.

And 66% say it would be healing if we covered more stories about people trying to engage in civil discourse on issues.

In sum, a majority of you believe that local media can help restore sorely needed social capital to our communities. With your support, healthy vibrant local media can be the Gorilla Glue that helps put this country back together

About three-quarters of Americans (74%) think hosting forums that bring people from different backgrounds together to discuss their experiences (like the Gazette’s Community Conversations) are healing.

And 66% say it would be healing if we covered more stories about people trying to engage in civil discourse on issues.

In sum, a majority of you believe that local media can help restore sorely needed social capital to our communities. With your support, healthy vibrant local media can be the Gorilla Glue that helps put this country back together.

The bolded part reflects what we do here at The Smokey Wire. Sometimes I’ve found it hard to explain why we do this, but I like the idea of it being “healing.”

I’ll just highlight two stories that I think reflect the local vs. national tendencies (and, of course, funding by national groups can affect local stories).

State Political Antics:

NOTE: THIS HAS BEEN CORRECTED, THANKS TO MATTHEW, I MISREAD THE ARTICLE IN COPO, THANKS, MATTHEW!

This one from Colorado Politics talks about Governor Polis’ appointing some fairly unusual folks to the State Wildlife and Parks Board, and even a former WEG general counsel under a slot for production agriculture (which strikes some folks as odd, including me; imagine if the Forest Service in this Administration had a FACA committee with a slot for environmental groups and selected someone from the Farm Bureau?).

We can get an idea of nuts and bolts of State Government from local news.  Previously we’ve discussed an OPB story on how Oregon treats the timber industry. This Colorado Politics article talks about the nuts and bolts of appointments to the State Wildlife and Parks Board, and talks about representation from different parts of the State- or not – and did an open records search to see who was recommending folks and where they were from.  The CoPo article asked the question “if the idea was to get more people on the commission from the Eastern Plains, is someone who moved there three years ago and appeared to be splitting his time appropriate (Tutchton of WEG)?”.  But the fact is that Polis doesn’t have to appoint anyone from the Eastern Plains or the Western Slope to the Commission if he doesn’t want to.

But I think it’s important that someone reports on this, because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have an idea for how the State is working. Covering States is also important IMHO because that’s where governments have to get many things done, and they are the incubators for policy change. I don’t think we can get an idea of government in the US if we just focus on the Feds which of course national media tend to do. At least here in Colorado, there has been a history of working across party lines at the state level.

People Working Together To Do Good Things:

This one from this morning in the Gazette about a new conservation easement in SW Colorado-here the framing is ranches are better than subdivisions. In this framing, ranchers are partners, not enemies, of conservation and are good for wildlife and watersheds. Of course, this depends on the assumed alternatives, on federal lands it’s “no cows”; on private, it’s subdivisions and resorts.

The private ranches will remain that; the public can roam the peripheries, South San Juan Wilderness to the west, Rio Grande National Forest to the east and Continental Divide Trail to the north. The easements mean “what gets restricted and eliminated forever is subdivisions and any kind of significant development,” Quinlan said. “You’ll never see a resort in this valley.”

On Banded Peak Ranch, the easement preserves 33 miles of streams feeding a system especially critical to New Mexico. The tributaries benefit the San Juan-Chama Project, supplying drinking water for up to 90% of Albuquerque.

Along with water, conservationists had wildlife in mind in the mission. Elk, bighorn sheep, peregrine falcons and the federally threatened Canada lynx call the area home. As does a particular strain of cutthroat trout believed extinct until a 2018 discovery.

That all being said, if you run across a local story on our issues that you think has an interesting angle to it, please share with me at my email and I will round them up and post a collection. PSA if you can, please support your local news!

Yes, Virginia, Political Appointees Do Meet With Interest Groups: The Importance of Context in News Stories

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Secretary Zinke meets with
Outdoor Recreation Industry Roundtable (ORIR)
Photo credit: Tami Heilemann

Ruben Navarrette, a syndicated columnist who shows up in the Colorado Springs Gazette op-ed page, recently wrote a column in which he talks about the importance of context in news stories. I like to think of news stories as newborn babies, and the work of NCFP regulars as wrapping the stories in a warm, fluffy blanket of context. Navarette gives some examples and concludes:

Context changes a minor story from what one president is doing wrong into a major story about what’s wrong with our political system.

What he is saying is that our fluffy blankets of context can add not only to fairness and accuracy, but ultimately also to framing problems differently. Here’s an easy example from our own subject area.

This is from Greenwire via the Society for Environmental Journalism here.

“Andrew Wheeler met with a range of companies and trade groups with interests before EPA after he took charge at the agency….

Wheeler was scheduled to call or meet with executives for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, BP America, Delta Air Lines and Valero Energy Corp. during that month, according to the document. In addition, he was slated to take meetings with agricultural interests, like the American Soybean Association and CropLife America.”

Wheeler met with groups with “interests before EPA”. Oh my goodness. This news story seems to assume that the best regulation is done without speaking to the regulated about their views and concerns. Logically, then Secretaries of the Interior should not meet with members of the Outdoor Recreation Industry? If, on the other hand, we want to add context, as Navarrette suggests, to “what’s wrong with the political system” we can look across administrations, and also in the eyes of state and local government officials.

Here’s a link to quotes from a letter by former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal (D), of Wyoming, to then Secretary of the Interior Salazar about changes in oil and gas regulations.

“I appreciate your stated intentions to restore balance to the leasing program. Unfortunately the proposed changes potentially hand significant control over oil and gas exploration, development and production to the whims of those that profess a ‘nowhere, not ever’ philosophy to surface disturbance of any kind,” Freudenthal wrote Salazar on Jan. 8.

“I have always been a strong proponent of balance” but “Washington…seems to go from pillar to post to placate what is perceived as a key constituency. I only half-heartedly joke with those in industry that, during the prior administration, their names were chiseled above the chairs outside the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals. With the changes announced [by Interior earlier this month] I fear that we are merely swapping the names above those same chairs [with] environmental interests, giving them a stranglehold on an already cumbersome process,” Freudenthal said.

Freudenthal seems to wonder whether citizens are well-served by disruptive flip flops on policy associated with administrations who change the advisory input from “lots of x” to “never, nohow, no way x” based on listening predominantly to one set of interest groups. The impacted states might prefer a more pragmatic and less ideological middle path, with a focus on reducing impacts rather than removing industry. They were good questions in 2010, IMHO, and remain good questions today.

Slanted News?

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I found an LA Times article regarding the Rim Fire, as well as the future of forest management within the Sierra Nevada. Of course, Chad Hanson re-affirms his preference to end all logging, everywhere. There’s a lot of seemingly balanced reporting but, there is no mention of the Sierra Nevada Framework, and its diameter limits. There is also the fact that any change to the SNF will take years to amend. There was also no mention that only about 20,000 Federal acres of the Rim Fire was salvaged, with some of that being in 40-year old plantations.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rim-fire-restoration-20180718-story.html

There might also be another ‘PictureGate“, involving Chad Hanson displaying supposed Forest Service clearcut salvage logging. His folks have already displayed their inability to locate themselves on a map. If he really had solid evidence, he SURELY would have brought it into court

Additionally, the comments are a gold mine for the misinformation and polarization of the supposedly ‘progressive’ community of readers.

Trump “demands” more logging. Really? Does he ever request, suggest or ask for information? I’m tired of hearing of Trump’s “demands.” It could be that some logging would be beneficial but the minute Trump “demands” it, it is suspect. One of his friends will be making millions on the logging and probably giving a kickback to a Trump business. Trump is the destructor of all things beautiful or sacred, the King Midas of the GOP.

A tiny increase in logging of small trees is very unlikely to generate “millions”.

You have no idea what “forest management” is. You want to clearcut all of the old growth forests and then turn them into Christmas tree lots and pine plantations. That is industrial tree farming, not forest management. That is the dumb dogma, speaking, not actual management of the forests.

Most people in southern California don’t know that Forest Service clearcutting and old growth harvesting in the Sierra Nevada has been banned since 1993. The article makes no mention of that.

Riddle me this, Lou. How did the forests manage before we spent $2.5 billion dollars a year on fire suppression? Are we the problem or the cure? Is this just another out of control bureaucracy with a life of its own?

Of course, no solution offered.

Wildfires and Climate Change: A Media Campaign?

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13 years after Hayman Fire

You don’t have to read too many papers or online sources to see that funders of various ilks influencing people through media campaigns is a topic of some discussion.
What would we see if we were looking for that fingerprint in our own topic area?
We’ve seen the Gazette article from yesterday. It carefully laid out a variety of reasons for fires but ended on a climate change note.
The same topic could be coordinated. For example the Denver Post published this op-ed last Sunday. The theme is the New Normal.

Here in the West, we can respond to the predicted drastic increase in wildfires by adopting policies that limit further development in the “wildland-urban interface.” Such developments will require huge expenditures to defend from fire, and they will likely ultimately burn no matter what we do.

And yesterday the AP weighed in with this piece.

“Far more wildfires rage.”

And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large. “You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year. In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.

Which scientists are quoted in this article? Climate scientists.. and they know about trends in other explanatory factors.. how?

Now all of us who have been following this know that there are several ways of thinking about “bad fires” but that those are all human constructs. Acres? Acres including burn intensity above x? Houses and infrastructure? Numbers of individual fires regardless of acreage? If you use acres, it seems like it could be influenced by fire policy changes in terms of WFU. Numbers of fires could be a function of more people in the woods not being careful. Here’s what a piece in the Daily Caller says..

2. Wildfires

The AP reports that “wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.”

While this is true, the AP’s narrowing of its analysis to just the past 30 years leaves presents a misleading picture. Wildfires may be burning more acreage today than the 1980s, but that pales in comparison to the great fires of the early 20th Century.

The scale of U.S. wildfires has decreased dramatically since 1930, according to government estimates. That year, wildfires burned more than four times the amount of acreage burned in 2012.

In 1930, for example, wildfires consumed more than 50 million acres of land, but in 2012 wildfires only burnt up 9.2 million acres.

Roger Pielke also wrote in the same piece about hurricanes, and it’s pretty simple. You can look at landfalls or costs of destruction. But wildfires can’t work the same way because people suppress them, they change how they suppress them through time and they didn’t used to suppress them at all..prior to 100 years ago. Remember the piece here when we looked at Leiburg’s forest condition reports from the early 1900s. So there’s almost complete overlap between when we would expect to see the signal for climate change and suppression which leads to more fuels and so on..

Here’s another thought from where I sit in Colorado. In dry western forests, fires can’t keep getting worse and increasing acres through time, because at some point they are already burned and don’t have time to grow back to a point where fuel loadings are enough to have a serious out of control fire. See the photo above 13 years after the Hayman. Certainly this is not true in parts of the old timber basket country, but as a person who used to spend time measuring seedling growth in south-Central Oregon, I think it will take a while. Plus the fact that burned areas can provide handy points for suppression efforts. In fact, they may grow more slowly due to climate change, or trees may not come back at all (due to lack of seed? changes in soil characteristics? competition from shrubs? or climate change?) and future fires may be less of a problem. My point is that regardless of climate attribution, we all agree on a solution (better county planning, prescribed burning, living with fire) so why wouldn’t we focus on something we know how to do (and is a heavy lift)? Even if we stopped climate change now tomorrow, we would still have wildfires and pretty much the same conditions We don’t know how or if conditions will stabilize or reverse, and they can’t really reverse- time’s arrow goes in one direction.

Media Campaigns and Their Sources: Dave Skinner on the Western Values Project

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From Western Values Project website.

While looking at the Western Values Project following up on the E&E News story Steve Wilent mentioned here, I found this op-ed in the Sacramento Bee about the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

This campaign against reform of the conservation fund is cleverly disguised. The group behind the ads is called the Western Values Project, but it is a front group backed by the D.C.-based New Venture Fund, an organization that runs more than 100 similar projects and has received tens of millions of dollars from environmentalist interests.

And then I found this piece, from Dave Skinner of Montana, who has posted on this blog before.. an op-ed in the Flathead Beacon here.

“Do you think either of these experienced progressive public-relations workers would generate all those press releases and produce those ads for free?

Nope — so who really foots the bill and whose “Western majority” values are being voiced?

Well, we have to go back to 2013 when WVP issued its first press release, which reads (way at the bottom) that WVP “receives financial support from New Venture Fund.”

Again, readers, but not reporters, are forgiven if they’ve never heard of the Washington, DC-based New Venture, a “501(c)3 public charity [which] supports innovative public interest projects […]” NVF began in 2006 as the Arabella Legacy Fund, taking about $725,000 from Swiss eco-billionaire Hans Wyss for an “innovative” project called Responsible Trails America (RTA). RTA hired Greens to pose as off-road users on state trail funding committees, working to divert gas-tax money from motorized to non-motorized trails. That’s innovation!

From that small start, Arabella-nee-NVF has become massive. NVF’s 2015 funding, as shown on the most recent IRS “charity” tax return available, was $315.7 million bucks! From whom? Forget it, that’s not open to public inspection. To whom? Oh, the anti-gun Americans for Responsible Solutions ($1.013 million); Sierra Club Foundation ($515,000), hundreds of grants totaling $87 million, and not a dime of it political in any way. Majority western values, my eye!

There is nothing to be found about WVP, its budget, its purpose, anywhere in NVF’s records, nor on its web site, nor in any news stories.

Worse, while there’s a smallish number of “news” stories highlighting multiple “six-figure” advertising buys by WVP in multiple states the past few years — not one single “credentialed” journalist, left, right, or straight, from Montana or elsewhere, has ever caught on to WVP’s true nature.

Western Values Project is a dark-money front, buried deep inside the Russian-doll corporate structure of an unknown, yet multi-mega-dollar “charity” called the New Venture Fund. Probably, but instead, Montana’s TV media ran these ads during news prime time — grabbing big bucks while failing to spend a penny of their windfall on, yep, actual investigative news.”

If folks say “the Koch brothers do it too” that doesn’t really help IMHO. The problem to me is that you can’t interpolate the truth from two groups that are prone to using sophisticated media campaigns to make their case. They twist the facts and intentionally talk past each other. Or as Dave Skinner said in the comments to the Flathead op-ed “The real trouble is, both sides have gotten sophisticated enough at the funding kabuki that average Americans are people are getting the full mushroom treatment.”